Speaker: Lisa K. Haegele, Deptartment of World Languages & Literatures, Texas State University

Abstract: »My current book project explores West German genre films in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While scholarship on German cinema of this period focuses almost exclusively on the New German Cinema, the internationally revered art cinema movement, I examine popular films that offer alternative perspectives on German history and politics in the “global sixties.” In this workshop, I would like to discuss my chapter in progress on the West German neo-Western and its variations on the rape-revenge genre. I focus on Roger Fritz’s Mädchen mit Gewalt (1970), a film that centers on the abduction and rape of a young woman, Alice, by two men over the course of an evening in a gravel quarry on the outskirts of Munich. The film belongs to a long list of films made in the early 1970s that depict rape: Sam Peckinpah’s rape-revenge film Straw Dogs (1971), Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), and Wes Craven’s B-horror film Last House on the Left (1972), based on Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish art film Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring, 1960). In my chapter, I show how Fritz’s film departs from more popular representations of rape in the cinema by emphasizing the victim’s “secondary victimization” by the legal system and patriarchal society long after the on-screen physical attack. In so doing, the film, widely rejected by critics, failed to address larger, putatively more important questions of national politics, history, and representation. I argue that the film’s failure to link its subject of rape to more abstract, masculinist notions of nation and national identity is precisely where the film succeeds from a feminist perspective.
In this workshop, I am most interested in discussing how Mädchen mit Gewalt thwarts the expectations of a rape-revenge narrative when Alice refuses to castrate her rapist at the end of the film. Using Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” I suggest that rape-revenge films are cruelly optimistic in the sense that they aim to generate pleasurable, empowering affects that distract feminist motivations to bring about real change. By advocating female liberation through violent, often murderous, retaliation, rape-revenge films ensure that that liberation remains an impossibility, relegated to the realm of mere fantasy whose power rests on its promise and attraction. Through Alice’s refusal to exact brutal revenge on her rapist, Mädchen mit Gewalt resists the cruel optimism of rape-revenge fantasies, opting instead to emphasize the enduring, deeply complex, and not-so-easily solvable struggles that victims of sexual assault must face in the real world. From today’s perspective in the era of #MeToo, this West German B-film—long overlooked by critics and scholars—promises to spark some productive discussions on sexual violence and the potential limits of rape-revenge fantasies in the cinema.« (Source: Online Program)

Publication: Haegele, Lisa. »"Eine gigantische Vergewaltigung" Rape as Subject in Roger Fritz's Mädchen mit Gewalt (1970).« German #MeToo: Rape Cultures and Resistance, 1770-2020. Edited by Elisabeth Krimmer et al. Rochester 2022: 263-282. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany | History of the Americas: History of the United States | Film: Rape and revenge | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in Germany